A look at how fiscal cliff compromises could affect young people—and by extension, the country's economic future

Jessica Rinaldi/Reuters

As negotiations to avert the "fiscal cliff" grind on, one thing seems clear: Deal or no deal, the social safety net is going to look very different in the years to come. The specifics of a deal remain murky, but everything from Medicaid to Medicare to Social Security to food stamps to education spending is reported to be vulnerable.

In an article here a few weeks ago, Helaine Olen explained why women, who are disproportionately likely to be poor and reliant on government programs, are particularly vulnerable to social safety net cuts. A new paper suggests one more reason, and also offers evidence on how cuts to programs that target early childhood will impact those children for decades to come. Researchers Hilary W. Hoynes, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, and Douglas Almond analyzed the long-term effects of the introduction of the U.S. Food Stamp program in the 1960s and early 1970s. They found that women who had access to food stamps in early childhood scored better on measures of economic self-sufficiency decades later. Children of both genders, meanwhile, were less likely to battle metabolic syndrome—the group of risk factors that increase a person's chances of getting heart disease and diabetes—later in life.

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"It speaks to the intergenerational transfer of welfare idea—sometimes people claim that one of the downsides of welfare is when you see your parents on it, then you're more likely to go on it," explains Schanzenbach. "We find the opposite—I think it's the best evidence I've seen on it. There's more resources for you and your kid—you're better able to invest in health and nutrition."

While the paper is one of the first to focus on the long-term effects of early childhood exposure to the social safety net (in this case, food stamps), a number of other studies have found that the effects of early childhood interventions differ by gender—and are larger for girls. For example, a 2008 analysis of early education programs implemented in the 1960's and 1970's found that girls in the programs enjoyed short- and long-term benefits, while boys experienced no such gains.

"For females, the thing that's really striking is that there were large effects on educational attainment—whether or not they graduated high school and, to a lesser extent, whether or not they had gone to college," says Michael Anderson, the study's author. "There were also weakly positive effects on economic measures—like whether or not you were unemployed or received welfare transfers, and so forth." Anderson found no such effects for the boys in the programs.

A 2007 paper analyzing the effects of a housing voucher program in the 1990s found that moving to better neighborhoods had positive effects on education, risky behavior, and physical health for girls, but adverse affects for boys. Meanwhile, research in Indonesia on the effect of positive agricultural shocks in early childhood also found greater effects on economic, education, and health outcomes for girls than boys.

"I think the balance of the evidence is that the effects are bigger for girls," says Janet Currie, one of the leading researchers on early childhood interventions. But she cautioned that the research is still mixed and controversial—a fewstudies have found early childhood interventions to be more beneficial for boys.

The researchers I spoke to aren't sure why boys and girls respond differently to these early childhood interventions. Janet Currie wonders if the interventions, particularly those focused on early education, just aren't as boy-friendly, a theory Michael Anderson also mentioned to me. "If you think about all that literature about boys not doing well in school and schools being female-centric, with female teachers," says Currie. "I can imagine that maybe the interventions are not as well-tailored."

Diane Schanzenbach offered another possible explanation for the gender differences across studies: Interventions most affect whoever is at the margin. In the 1960s and 1970s, when food stamps were being rolled out across the country, that was women. "My sense about this is these girls were growing up at times when women were entering the labor market in different ways, going to college more," she says. "So it makes sense that when we increased resources in the 1960s and 1970s, it disproportionately impacted girls. I think what might be going on is that the marginal group is different in each of these studies."

Schanzenbach's theory raises the question: who is the marginal group today? "It's hard to know—I think that boys are more likely to be on the margin now," she says. "But I think the difference might be pretty narrow."

So what will happen to all the babies, toddlers, and preschoolers—of both genders—relying on the social safety net today? On this, all the economists I spoke to agree. Early childhood interventions have significant long-term effects on education, health, and economic outcomes. Cutting programs that focus on early childhood will affect children for years to come.

"We need to think about it in a multi-generational context," says Lance Lochner, whose research on the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), a refundable tax credit available to qualified working families, found bigger effects for boys. "You can give money away to build bridges and roads. Or you can give money to invest in kids. I think our research suggests that at least the way EITC does it - targeting families with kids, families that are working but low-income—that is a fairly effective way of investing in children. When times are tight, you worry about spending, but it's not a good time to stop making investments."

"People are asking: do we reduce spending on education or do we reduce spending on pensions?" points out Schanzenbach. "And everyone says, 'Oh, we can't cut pensions'—and that might be the choice we want to make—but you gotta note that not only are we going to harm kids today, but it's going to harm our economic productivity in 20 years or 40 years."

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During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

Since the end of World War II, the most crucial underpinning of freedom in the world has been the vigor of the advanced liberal democracies and the alliances that bound them together. Through the Cold War, the key multilateral anchors were NATO, the expanding European Union, and the U.S.-Japan security alliance. With the end of the Cold War and the expansion of NATO and the EU to virtually all of Central and Eastern Europe, liberal democracy seemed ascendant and secure as never before in history.

Under the shrewd and relentless assault of a resurgent Russian authoritarian state, all of this has come under strain with a speed and scope that few in the West have fully comprehended, and that puts the future of liberal democracy in the world squarely where Vladimir Putin wants it: in doubt and on the defensive.

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You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

Modern slot machines develop an unbreakable hold on many players—some of whom wind up losing their jobs, their families, and even, as in the case of Scott Stevens, their lives.

On the morning of Monday, August 13, 2012, Scott Stevens loaded a brown hunting bag into his Jeep Grand Cherokee, then went to the master bedroom, where he hugged Stacy, his wife of 23 years. “I love you,” he told her.

Stacy thought that her husband was off to a job interview followed by an appointment with his therapist. Instead, he drove the 22 miles from their home in Steubenville, Ohio, to the Mountaineer Casino, just outside New Cumberland, West Virginia. He used the casino ATM to check his bank-account balance: $13,400. He walked across the casino floor to his favorite slot machine in the high-limit area: Triple Stars, a three-reel game that cost $10 a spin. Maybe this time it would pay out enough to save him.

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I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

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